Global Capitalism and the Global Police State: Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism
The world capitalist system is arguably experiencing the
worst crisis in its 500 year history. World capitalism has experienced a
profound restructuring through globalisation over the past few decades
and has been transformed in ways that make it fundamentally distinct
from its earlier incarnations. Similarly, the current crisis exhibits
features that set it apart from earlier crises of the system and raise
the stakes for humanity.
If we are to avert disastrous outcomes we must understand both
the nature of the new global capitalism and the nature of its crisis.
Analysis of capitalist globalisation provides a template for probing a
wide range of social, political, cultural and ideological processes in
this 21st century. Following Marx, we want to focus on the internal
dynamics of capitalism to understand crisis. And following the global
capitalism perspective, we want to see how capitalism has qualitatively
evolved in recent decades.
The system-wide crisis we face is not a repeat of earlier
such episodes such as that of the the 1930s or the 1970s precisely
because capital- ism is fundamentally different in the 21st century.
Globalisation constitutes a qualitatively new epoch in the ongoing and
open-ended evolution of world capitalism, marked by a number of
qualitative shifts in the capitalist system and by novel articulations
of social power. I highlight four aspects unique to this epoch.1
First is the rise of truly transnational capital and a new
global production and financial system into which all nations and much
of humanity has been integrated, either directly or indirectly. We have
gone from a world economy, in which countries and regions were linked to
each other via trade and financial flows in an integrated international
market, to a global economy, in which nations are linked to each more
organically through the transnationalisation of the production process,
of finance, and of the circuits of capital accumulation.
No single nation-state can remain insulated from the global economy
or prevent the penetration of the social, political, and cultural
superstructure of global capitalism. Second is the rise of a
Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC), a class group that has drawn in
contingents from most countries around the world, North and South, and
has attempted to position itself as a global ruling class. This TCC is
the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale. Third is the rise of
Transnational State (TNS) apparatuses. The TNS is constituted as a
loose network made up of trans-, and supranational organisations
together with national states. It functions to organise the conditions
for transnational accumulation.
The TCC attempts to organise and institutionally exercise
its class power through TNS apparatuses. Fourth are novel relations of
inequality, domination and exploitation in global society, including an
increasing importance of transnational social and class inequalities
relative to North-South inequalities.
Cyclical, Structural, and Systemic Crises
Most commentators on the
contemporary crisis refer to the “Great Recession” of 2008 and its
aftermath. Yet the causal origins of global crisis are to be found in
over-accumulation and also in contradictions of state power, or in what
Marxists call the internal contradictions of the capitalist system.
Moreover, because the system is now global, crisis in any one place
tends to represent crisis for the system as a whole. The system cannot
expand because the marginalisation of a significant portion of humanity
from direct productive participation, the downward pressure on wages and
popular consumption worldwide, and the polarisation of income, has
reduced the ability of the world market to absorb world output. At the
same time, given the particular configuration of social and class forces
and the correlation of these forces worldwide, national states are
hard-pressed to regulate trans- national circuits of accumulation and
offset the explosive contradictions built into the system.
Is this crisis cyclical, structural, or systemic? Cyclical
crises are recurrent to capitalism about once every 10 years and
involve recessions that act as self-correcting mechanisms without any
major restructuring of the system. The recessions of the early 1980s,
the early 1990s, and of 2001 were cyclical crises. In contrast, the 2008
crisis signaled the slide into a structural crisis. Structural crises
reflect deeper contra- dictions that can only be resolved by a major
restructuring of the system. The structural crisis of the 1970s was
resolved through capitalist globalisation.
Prior to that, the structural crisis of the 1930s was resolved
through the creation of a new model of redistributive capitalism, and
prior to that the structural crisis of the 1870s resulted in the
development of corporate capitalism. A systemic crisis involves the
replacement of a system by an entirely new system or by an outright
collapse. A structural crisis opens up the possibility for a systemic
crisis. But if it actually snowballs into a systemic crisis – in this
case, if it gives way either to capitalism being superseded or to a
breakdown of global civilisation – is not predetermined and depends
entirely on the response of social and political forces to the crisis
and on historical contingencies that are not easy to forecast. This is
an historic moment of extreme uncertainty, in which collective responses
from distinct social and class forces to the crisis are in great flux.
Hence my concept of global crisis is broader than
financial. There are multiple and mutually constitutive dimensions –
economic, social, political, cultural, ideological and ecological, not
to mention the existential crisis of our consciousness, values and very
being. There is a crisis of social polarisation, that is, of social
reproduction. The system cannot meet the needs or assure the survival of
millions of people, perhaps a majority of humanity. There are crises of
state legitimacy and political authority, or of hegemony and
domination. National states face spiraling crises of legitimacy as they
fail to meet the social grievances of local working and popular classes
experiencing downward mobility, un- employment, heightened insecurity
and greater hardships.
The legitimacy of the system has increasingly been called into
question by millions, perhaps even billions, of people around the world,
and is facing expanded counter-hegemonic challenges. Global elites have
been unable counter this erosion of the system’s authority in the face
of world- wide pressures for a global moral economy. And a canopy that
envelops all these dimensions is a crisis of sustain- ability rooted in
an ecological holocaust that has already begun, expressed in climate
change and the impending collapse of centralised agricultural systems in
several regions of the world, among other indicators. By a crisis of
humanity I mean a crisis that is approaching systemic proportions,
threatening the ability of billions of people to survive, and raising
the specter of a collapse of world civilisation and degeneration into a
new “Dark Ages.”2
This crisis of humanity shares a number of aspects with
earlier structural crises but there are also several features unique to
the present:
1. The system is fast reaching the ecological limits of
its reproduction. Global capitalism now couples human and natural
history in such a way as to threaten to bring about what would be the
sixth mass extinction in the known history of life on earth.3
This mass extinction would be caused not by a natural
catastrophe such as a meteor impact or by evolutionary changes such as
the end of an ice age but by purposive human activity. According to
leading environmental scientists there are nine “planetary boundaries”
crucial to maintaining an earth system environment in which humans can
exist, four of which are experiencing at this time the onset of
irreversible environmental degradation and three of which (climate
change, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss) are at “tipping
points,” meaning that these processes have already crossed their
planetary boundaries.
2. The magnitude of the
means of violence and social control is unprecedented, as is the
concentration of the means of global communication and symbolic
production and circulation in the hands of a very few powerful groups.
Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and so forth,
have changed the face of warfare. Warfare has become normalised and
sanitised for those not directly at the receiving end of armed
aggression. At the same time we have arrived at the panoptical
surveillance society and the age of thought control by those who control
global flows of communication, images and symbolic production. The
world of Edward Snowden is the world of George Orwell; 1984 has arrived;
3. Capitalism is reaching apparent limits to its extensive
expansion. There are no longer any new territories of significance that
can be integrated into world capitalism, de-ruralisation is now well
advanced, and the commodification of the countryside and of pre- and
non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that is, converted in hot-house
fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching
depths never before seen. Capitalism must continually expand or
collapse. How or where will it now expand?
4. There is the rise of a vast surplus population
inhabiting a “planet of slums,”4 alienated from the productive economy,
thrown into the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social
control and to destruction – to a mortal cycle of
dispossession-exploitation-exclusion. This includes prison- industrial
and immigrant-detention complexes, omnipresent policing, militarised
gentrification, and so on;
5. There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy
and a nation-state based system of political authority. Transnational
state apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to play the role
of what social scientists refer to as a “hegemon,” or a leading
nation-state that has enough power and authority to organise and
stabilise the system. The spread of weapons of mass destruction and the
unprecedented militarisation of social life and conflict across the
globe makes it hard to imagine that the system can come under any stable
political authority that assures its reproduction.
Global Police State
How have social and political forces worldwide responded
to crisis? The crisis has resulted in a rapid political polarisation in
global society. Both right and left-wing forces are ascendant. Three
responses seem to be in dispute.
One is what we could call “reformism from above.” This
elite reformism is aimed at stabilising the system, at saving the system
from itself and from more radical responses from below. Nonetheless, in
the years following the 2008 collapse of the global financial system it
seems these reformers are unable (or unwilling) to prevail over the
power of transnational financial capital. A second response is popular,
grassroots and leftist resistance from below. As social and political
conflict escalates around the world there appears to be a mounting
global revolt. While such resistance appears insurgent in the wake of
2008 it is spread very unevenly across countries and regions and facing
many problems and challenges.
Yet another response is that I term 21st century fascism.5
The ultra-right is an
insurgent force in many countries. In broad strokes, this project seeks
to fuse reactionary political power with transnational capital and to
organise a mass base among historically privileged sectors of the global
working class – such as white workers in the North and middle layers in
the South – that are now experiencing heightened insecurity and the
specter of downward mobility. It involves militarism, extreme
masculinisation, homophobia, racism and racist mobilisations, including
the search for scapegoats, such as immigrant workers and, in the West,
Muslims. Twenty-first century fascism evokes mystifying ideologies,
often involving race/culture supremacy and xenophobia, embracing an
idealised and mythical past. Neo-fascist culture normalises and
glamorises warfare and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination
with domination that is portrayed even as heroic.
The need for dominant groups around the world to secure
widespread, organised mass social control of the world’s surplus
population and rebellious forces from below gives a powerful impulse to
projects of 21st century fascism. Simply put, the immense structural
inequalities of the global political economy cannot easily be contained
through consensual mechanisms of social control. We have been witnessing
transitions from social welfare to social control states around the
world. We have entered a period of great upheavals, momentous changes
and uncertainties. The only viable solution to the crisis of global
capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward
towards the poor majority of humanity along the lines of a 21st century
democratic socialism, in which humanity is no longer at war with itself
and with nature.
William I. Robinson is professor of
sociology, global and international studies, and Latin American studies,
at the University of California-Santa Barbara. Among his many books are
Promoting Polyarchy (1996), Transnational Conflicts (2003), A Theory of
Global Capitalism (2004), Latin America and Global Capitalism (2008),
and Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (2014).
References
1.William I. Robinson (2004), A Theory of Global Capitalism:
Production, Class, and
State in a Transnational World, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press; William I. Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism (2008),
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, see esp. chapter 1.
2. Sing C. Chew (2007),
The Recurring Dark Ages: Ecological Stress, Climate Changes, and System
Transformation, Landham, MD: AltaMira Press.
3. Elizabeth Kolbert (2014), The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, New York: Henry Holt.
4. The phrase is from Mike Davis’ study, Planet of Slums (2007), London: Verso.
5. See in particular,
William I. Robinson (2014, in press), Global Capitalism and the Crisis
of Humanity, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
